TELECOM Digest Wed, 3 Nov 93 03:32:30 CST Volume 13 : Issue 734 Inside This Issue: Moderator: Patrick A. Townson Fire Update (Steve Lichter) Fires at Will (Jeff Sicherman) Book Review: "Globalization, Technology and Competition" (Rob Slade) Telecom-Tech Mailing List (Tom Ace) Canadian Internet Resources (Rick Broadhead) LZW Compression -vs- v.42bis Compression (Thaddeus H. Wood) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 2 Nov 93 16:16:42-0500 From: Steven Lichter Subject: Fire Update [Moderator's Note: This was written *before* Malibu ...and was delayed in transmission due to Steve's difficult work assignment at present. My thanks also go to the person at GTE who is faxing me updates; but Steve's account below seems to be quite detailed. We'll have to wait until later to hear what the scoop is on Malibu. PAT] Posted: Mon, Nov 1, 1993 3:53 PM PST Msg: NGJD-5641-2522 From: M.AMADOR To: GTCA, GTEL, CRISIS.COMM, R.J.PALMER, T.EDWARDS, P.MINER, L.NIGG, M.FOSTER, D.FIASCO, T.WHITE, M.ESSTMAN, T.ZIEGLER Subj: FIRE UPDATE - GTE CALIFORNIA The following is another in a series of updates that relate to the catastrophic fires in Southern California: STATUS AS OF 9:00 AM PST - NOVEMBER 1, 1993 I. CUSTOMER FACILITY IMPACTS: A. NETWORK SERVICES INLAND VALLEYS DIVISION The network has been fully restored. There are no outages. The Ortega fire area assessment has been completed. There is no GTE facility damage in that area. CENTRAL VALLEYS DIVISION The network has been fully restored. There are no outages. OCEAN VALLEYS DIVISION The network is fully restored. B. NETWORK PROVISIONING INLAND VALLEYS DIVISION There are no reported problems in this division. CENTRAL VALLEYS DIVISION Division personnel worked over the weekend to restore customer services in those areas impacted by the fire. Laguna is comprised of several small community divisions. In those divisions, the customers that are out of service are not the entire community; but spotty. 373 homes were destroyed. 91 customers have been returned to service. Total restoration for customers in this area requesting service and requiring outside plant repair or replacement will be completed on 11/4 Customer impact: Approximately 100 OCEAN VALLEYS DIVISION The areas of Mugu, Sycamore Canyon and Santa Paula have all been fully restored. Laguna Peak is restored and awaiting installation request from the customer. Carlisle Canyon is 40% restored. It will be 70% restored by the end of business November 1. Total restoration will be achieved by Thursday November 4, 1993. Customer impact: 20 - 25 customers Yerba Buena Canyon remains the most difficult area to restore. It is in a mountainous and difficult terrain. Complete restoration will require replacing 60,000 feet of cable and at least 12 utility poles. Crews are working to place poles in hard rock and elevated areas. It is estimated the majority of the customers in that area will be restored within 6 - 7 days. Total restoration may take up to 2 weeks. Customer impact: 200 - 250 customers SUMMARY: The remaining restoration efforts are concentrating on repair and replacement of outside plant. Only 375 of GTE California's customers remain out of service. This figure is down from the 2500 originally requiring restoration efforts. There is no damage to GTE buildings and all critical switching centers are operating. Repair call volumes from customers are at a normal or slightly lower than normal level. II. EMPLOYEE ISSUES Division personnel continue to work to provide service to GTE customers. The Customer Disaster Center established in Laguna Beach has processed over 100 orders and will remain open until Friday November 5, 1993. Ocean Valleys Division will augment the workforce in the restoration of Yerba Buena Canyon once the poles have been properly placed. At that time additional employees will be required. No employees have suffered a loss of their homes as a result of the fires. III. COMMUNITY RESPONSES The coin trailers placed in response to the disaster effort remain in the area and active. They provide free local and long distance calling to victims in the fire areas. Two of the trailers have been moved at the request of the cities either to misuse (in Malibu) by non victims or to improve accessibility. The Division of Ratepayers Advocates has contacted Regulatory to say they appreciated our periodic updates on fire response and restoration at GTE. Public Affairs continues to release internal and external statements to keep GTE activities in the forefront of employees and customers. Over 200 interviews have been given to the media and Public Affairs is in the process of drafting an advertisement to appear in local papers thanking customers and employees during this period. A $75,000 grant from the GTE Foundation has been requested to donate to the Red Cross. It is in the approval process and it is hoped the funds will be available for distribution no later than Wednesday November 3, to capitalize on press opportunities. The next scheduled conference call is on Tuesday November 2, at 9:00 AM PST. At that conference, attendees will receive an initial report on expenditures and determine the need for further calls. All restoration efforts and work completed will be permanent wherever possible. This will minimize duplication of restoration efforts. All charges of labor, material and labor are to be charged to the open ended work orders assigned to this project. Any questions from the field regarding the work order numbers may be called to Valerie Clairmont at 805/372-8106, if you are unable to resolve locally. The Emergency Operating Center is closed for calls; but personnel remain on stand by. Any questions regarding the information in this telemail or the Emergency Operating Center, other than the work orders, may be directed to M. Amador at 805/372-7512. M. AMADOR Administrator - Emergency Preparedness Posted: Mon, Nov 1, 1993 4:01 PM PST Msg: CGJD-5641-2791 From: B.J.BARBER To: gtca, gtel CC: l.higson Subj: Fire Damage Update The following is an all-employee bulletin November 1, 1993 Final fire damage restoration underway Approximately 375 of GTE California's 3.1 million customers statewide were still out of service on Monday morning due to the fires that hit Southern California last week. As of this morning, the GTE network is 100 percent operational. Employees continued to work throughout the weekend to restore service to customers. In the Laguna Beach area, more than 100 customers used the GTE service center set up at the Laguna Beach central office. Cellular phones were lent to 10 Laguna customers and a coin trailer was moved to the Laguna Beach City Hall. A total of 373 customer homes were destroyed in Laguna but work will be completed by Thursday to restore an additional 100 customer lines that were out of service due to the fire. In the Thousand Oaks fire, employees are working to restore more than 20 customer lines that were damaged by the fire in Carlisle Canyon. Most customers there will be back in service today. Complete restoration is expected by Thursday. In the Yerba Buena fire, employees are replacing a 60,000 foot cable, which includes stringing cable over canyons and an extensive amount of hand digging. Telephone service for 250 customers who were affected in that area will be restored in the next six to 14 days. "We are very service conscious and it is times like this when the real GTE comes out," said Mike Crawford, Vice President General Manager for GTE West Area. There were no employee injuries and no damage to employee homes reported from the fires. GTE has waived payment of the basic monthly phone rate for 90 days for Californians displaced by the fires. We also are offering fire victims free local and toll calling from coin phone trailers located in Malibu and Laguna Beach. AT&T, MCI and Sprint are providing free long-distance service from those phones, excluding international calls. GTE also is providing customers with free remote call forwarding, so they can be called on their usual phone number, which can be transferred to another location within GTE or Pacific Bell. Customers would pay only toll costs for this service. Or, displaced customers within GTE can use Personal Secretary at no charge. After 90 days, they would pay their basic phone rate, but could receive remote call forwarding or Personal Secretary free of charge until October 1994. To facilitate communications among firefighters, GTE has provided mobile cellular phones to fire departments in Ventura County and Laguna Beach. Additionally, GTE has provided phone lines to the Ventura County Sheriff's Dept., and for the emergency services command centers in Laguna Beach, Malibu, Thousand Oaks and Hemet. The company also installed a portable microwave facility to serve the Laguna Beach Police Dept. and is continuing to work with emergency agencies to provide communications capabilities. I sure hope you got this. Things are starting to cook here again. The Hemet fire is still going and now there is one in Woodland Hills. Steven Lichter GTECalif COEI [Moderator's Note: Steve's comment 'I sure hope you got this' is due to the fact that the first transmission of this bulletin was lost in transit. Little did he know (or maybe not, maybe experience has already prepared him) that Malibu would become an inferno next. :( PAT] ------------------------------ From: sichermn@csulb.edu (Jeff Sicherman) Subject: Fires at Will Date: 2 Nov 1993 21:28:20 GMT Organization: Cal State Long Beach The latest blaze ... the Calabasas/Topanga/Malibu fire (choose one, it'll be there before long anyway) is heading in the general direction of Saddle Peak, which is -- according to news reports -- a major installation site for PacBell, GTE, and emergency agencies communications (relay) equipment. It might be cellular stuff; they weren't too precise about it. Jeff Sicherman [Moderator's Note: A long time reader of the Digest wrote me Tuesday evening to say he woke up Tuesday with the fire a mile or so away, which I guess would make anyone jump out of bed in a hurry. It was good luck for him though that winds were blowing the fire away from him by that time. Maybe when he sees this he will write to comment on Saddle Peak, what he knows about it, and if it is skipped by the fires or not. What is going on in southern California? I mean, *everyone* knows California has fires every year; it is in the nature of things there. But this past week ... jeeze ... it seems much more extreme than in my past memory. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: 2 Nov 93 15:13 -0600 From: Rob Slade Subject: Book Review: "Globalization, Technology and Competition" BKGLBTCH.RVW 980930 Havard Business School Press Soldiers Field Road Boston, MA 02163 617-495-6700 617-495-6117 800-545-7685 617-495-6444 617-495-6334 fax: 617-496-8066 or McGraw-Hill Ryerson/Osborne 300 Water Street Whitby, Ontario L1N 9B6 416-430-5000 416-430-5047 Rita Bisram, Marketing fax: 416-430-5020 or 2600 Tenth St. Berkeley, CA 94710 USA 415-548-2805 800-227-0900 "Globalization, Technology and Competition", Bradley/Hausman/Nolan, U$34.95 The inclusion of "globalization" and "competition" in the title, as well as the imprimatur of the Harvard Business School indicate that this will be other than a technical manual. At the same time, the subtitle does give one hope that there will be some technical material of interest. One should know better by now. When business and technical interests clash, business always wins. "Business" research, along with much of economics, reminds one of the statement about much of educational research: if it isn't blatant nonsense, it's stuff your grandmother knew. As they say in Russia, there is no pravda in Izvetsia, and no izvetsia in Pravda (a pun on the names of the two major papers, the "Truth" and the "News"). This compilation of papers appears to have been taken from a single symposium and made to fit into a book. The heavy preponderance of professors from Harvard and MIT make the work seem quite self-indulgent. The range of companies studied goes from big to big: by the time you are finished you will know more than you ever wanted about the International Stock Exchange, General Electric Information Services, Saturn, Benetton, Wal-Mart and Rosenbluth Travel. In the absence of a preface or foreword, chapter (or paper) one, with the slightly reordered title of "Global Competition and Technology", would seem to fill that role, particularly as it is the only content of part one. However, after an initial laying of some foundations and a seeming introduction to part two, this first paper drifts into a mini-"Megatrend" essay which tries to touch all of the communications, technology and globalization bases without much apparent structure. The technical background is suspect in places, as where the authors applaud the death of standards, suggesting that this will drive the movement to open systems. This indicates a very profound lack of understanding of the necessity of standards for the open systems concept to even exist, and a limiting of the definition of "standard" to "proprietary standards", itself almost an oxymoron. Part two discusses organizational structures. If the aim is to propose any suggested style for "global" organizations, it is only scantily achieved. Malone and Rockart give us some rewording of Naismith's "networking", structure with an organization (as opposed to the hierarchical pyramid of traditional companies) with "adhocracies" and "answer networks". However, they appear to be proposing that such structures already exist within large corporations: their only evidence is a "gee whiz" listing of some information technologies already in use. Some idea of the framework under which a global organizational structure could develop would be helpful. Eccles and Nolan appear to want to give us that. Instead, we get a retreading of the usual "policy vs procedure" model of delegation from management to line workers (under the new phrase "superordinate design"). Tacking an additional title onto an existing acronym (GIS, commonly known as geographic information systems but here used as global information systems), Konsynski and Karimi purport to help us to design worldwide networks. Instead, we have vague business terms being applied to complex networking problems; one admission that networks might be limited by available technologies; and one "case study" which lists applications which are, again, impressive but do not address current major problems. Part three purports to talk about the creation and restructuring of industries. Whether this is supposed to be prescriptive (how to restructure) or descriptive (what new industries *will* look like) is left open. In any case, definitive statements about restructuring are hard to come by. Bradley's article lists some new industries and some restructured companies. But the role of information technology is not directly linked to any changes. The promised examination of the value and cost justification is limited to two paragraphs stating that measurements of return on investment for networks are difficult, seldom done, but should be done. Not very helpful. (In addition it is very difficult, in the paper, to distinguish technical networking from business, political or social "networking".) Hayter's chapter discussing the changes wrought by the introduction of electronic trading to the International Stock Exchange is fascinating but somewhat limited by the lack of specific examples of change to affected companies. The restructuring of a manufacturing industry is examined in the case of a particular company, but the Jaikumar/Upton paper goes to the opposite extreme and fails to give any account of technology in this firm limited not only to one nation, but to a restricted area within Italy. The Hammond article does study one technology area ("point of sale" information) and one industry (retail sales, particularly fashion) and produces the best of the bunch. More detail would have been helpful. One example in the fashion industry cites a six-week response time. That is half a "season" in fashion: it would be interesting to see how to shorten it. Part four is ostensibly aimed at the general manager who needs to respond strategically to the changes of globalization and technology. One would assume, therefore, that this section would be primarily practical. Not so. A paper by Clemons again trying to cover the whole field (and, again, demonstrating a basic misunderstanding of the business aspects of computing by the statement that information technology investments are feasible and not restricted to a single use with a single partner), a presentation of an IBM study on globalization that stresses "balance", and an interesting study of GM's Saturn division which makes almost no mention of technology. The one useful article details the international "expansion" of a travel agency through alliances with "local" firms in other countries and the use of technological assistance which supports and cements the alliance. The final section of the book is entitled, "Competing with Technology". However you wish to interpret that, the three papers have little to do with it. Hausman lists activities of various telecommunications carriers overseas, while the other two articles are two versions of peering into the future. The Marx article is quite "blue sky" in its assessment. The Hald and Konsynski article is more detailed but perhaps no more useful. The technologies it examines are certainly interesting. However, the recent development of a dependable replacement for the century-old gas meter design will likely turn a seven hundred million dollar gas meter supply industry into a twenty-five million dollar industry within three years (and have an even greater impact on gas service.) This may not be as "sexy" as virtual reality, but it will affect business much more over the next five years. The conference that prompted this book may simply have been a bad one. In all likelihood, though, this is a fair representation of current business thinking with regard to technology. Fuzzy. I would recommend that managers with a technical background study this book. My reason is the same reason I would give for studying BASIC. In self defence, it behooves you to know what the brass is being fed, and, what nonsense you might have to deal with. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993 BKGLBTCH.RVW 980930 Permission granted to distribute with unedited copies of the TELECOM Digest and associated mailing lists/newsgroups. DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 DECUS Symposium '94, Vancouver, BC, Mar 1-3, 1994, contact: rulag@decus.ca ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Nov 93 14:43:26 PST From: crux!tom@hercules.aptix.com (Tom Ace) Subject: Telecom-Tech Mailing List If (like me) you don't have a news feed, you can now read and participate in the discussions in alt.dcom.telecom, as it is now also available by mail as a digest. To quote from the heading of a recent issue: The Telecom-Tech Mailing List is an unmoderated forum for the discussion of the various technical aspects of modern and historical telecommuniations. Major topics include switching, physical means of transmission of analog and digital data, wireless communications, and methods of control and distribution of services. Discussions of legislation and regulation as they directly affect technology are also welcome. Telecom-Tech is bi-directionally gated to the newsgroup alt.dcom.telecom. Please send subscription requests and changes to: TeleTech-Request@zygot.ati.com Please send your articles to: teletech@zygot.ati.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Nov 93 18:11:47 EST From: Rick Broadhead Subject: Canadian Internet Resources Calling all Canadian Internet users! Rick Broadhead and Jim Carroll are working on an Internet book called the Canadian Internet Handbook. The Canadian Internet Handbook is expected to be the first Internet book with a Canadian perspective. To help us make this book truly Canadian, we are asking Internet users to send us information about Canadian Internet resources. Specifically, we are collecting the following types of information for the book: (1) Internet resources ** where the subject matter pertains to Canada ** (these resources don't have to be located in Canada) e.g. mailing lists, Gopher resources, telnet sites, FTP files, Canadian library catalogs accessible via the Internet (2) Internet resources located in Canada e.g. Gopher servers, IRC sites, telnet sites, FTP sites, archie sites, finger sites, and other Internet services available in Canada (3) Canadian organizations doing interesting work that involves the Internet (4) Canadian organizations that offer courses/seminars on how to use the Internet. Canadian organizations that do Internet training and consulting. (5) Statistics and interesting facts about the Internet in Canada (Canadian Internet trivia) (6) Anecdotes about how people and organizations are using the Internet in Canada. Do you have an interesting story to tell? How has the Internet helped you or your business/organization? We need your help! Here's how to submit information for the book: For items (1) and (2), please complete the enclosed form and return it to HANDBOOK@VM1.YorkU.CA. For items (3), (4), (5), and (6), please send the information directly to HANDBOOK@VM1.YorkU.CA. All contributions are greatly appreciated! Name of Canadian Internet Resource: Brief Description (1-4 sentences): How to Access the Resource (please provide instructions): Thank you for your contribution. For more information about the Canadian Internet Handbook, please contact the authors, as detailed below. Rick Broadhead, FAS, York University | Jim Carroll, J.A. Carroll Consulting Internet: HANDBOOK@VM1.YorkU.CA | Internet: jcarroll@jacc.com Voice: (416) 487-5220 | Voice: (905) 855-2950 ------------------------------ From: pustule@cats.ucsc.edu (Thaddeus H. Wood) Subject: LZW Compression -vs- v.42bis Compression Date: 2 Nov 1993 05:47:36 GMT Organization: University of California; Santa Cruz Okay. Here's my thought-dilemma. It's my intuitive belief that a file maximally compressed with a non real-time LZW algorithm, such as used in pkZIP or lha, should not be able to be compressed with a real-time algorithm such as v.42bis. This seems logical to me. If anyone can say otherwise, please do. Now, it is also my understanding that when using a 14.4kbs modem, one should be able to send 1440 bytes/second. Taking into consideration 1 start and 1 stop bit per byte. Now, what I want to know is why when I transfer a highly compressed file using a v.32bis and v.42bis modem, I almost always see a throughput of nearly 1650 bytes/second. My mind tells me that this compression ratio should not be possible in a real-time environment on already compressed data. So, my question is what am I not taking into account here, if my suppositions are correct? And if they are correct, then why hasn't anyone implemented a non real-time v.42bis implementation to compress those "uncompressable" LZW compressed files? Should save considerable HD space, no? And, of course, if this message seems totally ludicrous to you, please be forgiving. It's been a long day. Thaddeus H. Wood 715 Washington St. Suite D Santa Cruz, CA 95060 pustule@cats.ucsc.edu -- +1 408.423.8733 -- pustule@gorn.echo.com ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V13 #734 ****************************** ****************************************************************************** Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253